Speaking of Australian trains, there was some adventures further north in the state over the weekend, as reported by the ABC : Railway safety officials are looking into an incident involving a runaway coal train in the Hunter Valley. The fully laden coal train was unmanned and travelled several kilometres, including through level crossings. Gulp. Can you imagine? Sitting there waiting for the boom gates to go back up, only to see one of the heaviest trains possible cruising through t...

Figma reported 1,886 employees as of December 31, 2025, up 86% in a single year, according to its SEC filings. The design software company nearly doubled its headcount in the same year it listed on the NYSE. This piece covers Figma’s workforce size, department mix, geographic split, pay, hiring pace, and review scores, using figures from Figma’s own earnings release, SEC-sourced headcount data, Revelio Labs, Unify, and Glassdoor. Key Figma Employee Statistics The short version, with per...

This morning I finished reading Snow Country by Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata . The book was suggested to me by my cousin who, after our most recent dinner together where we talked at length about books, sent me a list of a dozen titles for me to read. When it comes to books that are suggested to me, I like to know as little as possible about them: I don’t research the author, I don’t read the blurb, I don’t seek reviews. I like to think that if someone suggested a book to me ther...

I'm running a programming contest I've spent the last few months working with friends to design the 29th annual ICFP programming contest. Designing a programming contest in a world with AI agents is tricky! I think we've made some interesting choices here. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/im-running-the-icfp-programming-contest I'm running a programming contest I've spent the last few months working with friends to design...

AKA "Spectrum has gone down two weeks in a row and I'm sick of it". I've been borrowing a portable 5G gateway from my Dad for a few weeks, for testing... and two weeks in a row, I've used it as a backup Internet option, since my Spectrum Business cable Internet has gone down. And yes, I'd get AT&T Fiber if I had the option, sadly they don't yet provide service at my studio. So I'm stuck with only one high speed wired provider. I may add on my own 5G backup Internet connection in the fut...

Honeywell Aerospace is building trusted autonomy for both commercial and defense platforms leveraging Shield AI software development kit FARNBOROUGH, United Kingdom (July 22, 2026)   —  Honeywell Aerospace (Nasdaq: HONA) and Shield AI, a leader in AI-powered mission autonomy, today announced a Memorandum of Understanding under which Honeywell Aerospace will develop a trusted autonomy software stack on Shield AI’s Hivemind Software Development Kit, integrating Honeywell Aerospace’s...

This story is wild. The short version: OpenAI were running a cybersecurity test against an unreleased model, with the model's guardrail features turned off. Rather than solve the test, the model broke its way out of OpenAI's sandbox, then found exploits to break in to Hugging Face, all so it could cheat on the test by stealing the answers. Along the way it helped make the strongest case yet for how the imbalance of model availability is hurting our ability to secure our software. Here's wh...

My great pal Eric Drysdale sent out one last note to a set of friends about an event he thought that set would enjoy, and I am extremely lucky to be included in that set. Eric has a beautiful and exquisite comedic sense, an opinion I have that is borne out by his legacy of comedic work, including The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Late Show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and more. He has stood down 20 years of a world gone mad and reworked it, within hours, into a performance of...

When your program asks for memory that is not in cache, the processor has to go to RAM. That trip costs on the order of 100 nanoseconds. On a 3 GHz core, that is about 300 cycles of doing nothing. Memory latency has not improved in ten years. The 2016 Broadwell answers a random access in 100 ns. The 2025 Turin, with DDR5-6400 and every advantage of a decade of progress, takes 140 ns. It got worse. The good news is that a modern core does not have to sit still. It can issue a second request b...

I wrote the following while standing on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, listening to music and watching the world. The joy of closing your eyes and being able to listen to the bagpipes. I look into the distance and see a traffic cone on the head of a statue. I notice how much busier it is than in previous weeks — how a place comes alive at different times, and in different months and seasons. The joy of standing in the busy city and watching the world move around you — people sauntering and thi...

(This blog post was adapted from the transcription obtained from my YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6lxgYeVZqs) When Linus Torvalds developed the first Linux kernel, he had studied the Minix sources, he had studied computer architecture, he had the base knowledge needed, and he was obviously a very brilliant programmer. But that operation of writing a minimal yet working Unix kernel for the 386 (at the beginning Linux was, let's say, mono-architecture) was something within t...

Codeberg recently changed its terms to exclude projects that are largely written with generative AI. Since I want GitHub to face competition I have thoughts. Codeberg is entirely within its rights to do this. It is an association with members and a democratic process, and that process produced a result. But democracy is a way of making a decision, not a guarantee that the decision is inclusive, wise, or even good for the people already depending on it. A majority can still decide that ...

One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology seems to keep getting bigger. Astronomers have known since the 1930s that the universe is expanding, but in the 1990s, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating rather than slowing down came as a huge shock to the field. Something had to be driving that acceleration, and dark energy was proposed as the cause. What began as a seismic shock in… Source One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology seems to keep getting bigger. Astronomers have know...

0.0 Context Setting Tuesday, 21 July 2026 in Portland, Oregon where it’s been hot. There’s been a Fifa Men’s World Cup Football Final which in my humble opinion went to the right team. 0.1 How People Work, Live! ... with Pavel Samsonov How People Work, Live! is a live version of my workshop, How People Work. I get to invite an interesting guest on and we talk about the hard things to do with the soft skills you need to not just get jobs done, but to do them well. You know, the soft ...

Back in the 90s when I was a young professor at the University of Chicago, we would have a Complexity Class of the Week  where I would take some interesting complexity class, write down on a white board everything we knew about it with some open problems and students and faculty would muse over it. When I started the blog in 2002, I took the concept online .  My first Complexity Class of the Week post  covered the class \(S_2^P\). Recently Rahul Santhanam said to me "\(L_2^P\) is the new \...

This year, I have the honor of serving as the program chair for the Haskell Symposium , co-located with the 2026 International Conference on Functional Programming , or ICFP to its friends 1 , on August 28-29 in Indianapolis, Indiana! The Haskell Symposium has existed in some form or another since 1995, and I’m proud to be part of this long tradition, now in its thirtieth iteration this year (wow!). It’s also a homecoming for me, since I did my PhD in Indiana back in my callow youth. I...

Laguna di Venezia by Anton Melbye, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at China’s EV subsidies, the future of aeroderivative gas turbines, a US-Saudi nuclear deal, defective roadway guardrails, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities The CEO of DR Horton, largest homebuilder in the US, th...

These days, unmanaged go func() calls don’t appear as often as they used to in the early days of Go. At this point, everyone knows Dave Cheney’s maxim to “never start a goroutine without knowing how it will stop” . Even so, I still occasionally run into unsynchronized go func() calls doing fire-and-forget work. I’m not talking about jobs handed to a dedicated task queue such as Asynq . In that case, the task system owns the lifecycle of the tasks it starts. I mean smaller, be...

Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play. It’s an arms-race to the bottom of a cesspit. Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play. It’s an arms-race to the bottom of a cesspit. Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play. It’s an arms-race to the bottom of a cesspit. Having clankers churn out content to feed the clankers is a futile game to play. It’s an arms-race t...

In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet. Today, everyone can write sort-of-okay CSS by delegating the task to an LLM. LLMs make everybody into a generalist. Because of this, lots of people don’t think there’s any skill involved in working with LLMs. If you want the product that LLMs can deliver — PhD-level mathematics, pretty good...

A montage of some asteroids and comets photographed up close by spacecraft. Image: The Planetary Society Why explore asteroids, comets, and other small worlds When to worry about an asteroid hitting Earth Psyche, exploring a metal world Japan wants to sample Mars’ moon Phobos with its MMX mission Weirdest types of moons in our Solar System Related:   Articles on moons other than our Moon ...

Now we’re getting to the fun stuff: GitOps . The act of pushing beautifully crafted .yaml files and seeing your Kubernetes cluster get red and stall out is surely what life’s all about. Install ArgoCD We have our Kubernetes cluster and now we’re going to bootstrap ArgoCD so it starts syncing from our git repository. Using helm: helm install argocd \ --repo https://argoproj.github.io/argo-helm \ argo-cd \ --namespace argocd \ --create-namespace \ ...

With this post, I’ll wrap up my notes from the second Future of Software Development Retreat . But before I do, I should note that the full Thoughtworks report on the retreat is now available . They have five headline findings: Code generation is no longer the bottleneck — verification is. ‘Harness engineering’ is emerging as a distinct, ownable discipline. Organizations are colliding with a real apprenticeship crisis. The executive/engineer expectation ...